Many professional practices and other businesses bill a client or customer on the basis of the time that is spent on the client's or customer's matters. Much of this time is often spent on the telephone, and this is not always adequately recorded, if it is recorded at all.
Telephone time recording systems are available that record the duration of a telephone call and also the telephone number that was called. Although the record that is generated by such systems can readily be used by the user of the system to establish the cost of the call, ie the amount that he will be charged for the call by the provider of the telephone service, it does not lend itself to being used for billing purposes where the time spent by the person making or receiving the call should also be accounted for. Firstly, it is not possible from such a record to identify the individual persons who participated in the call. Secondly, it does not identify the subject matter of the call. Thirdly, a record is made of outgoing calls only. Incoming calls are left unrecorded.
Systems are also available in which a sound recording is made of the voice communication that takes place during a telephone call. The voice communication is recorded from beginning to end. An accurate record of the length of the call is not available unless it is made separately, in a system of the type described in the preceding paragraph, in which event it will be a cumbersome procedure to correlate the sound recording with the call duration record. Furthermore, a large amount of recording space and/or much retrieving time is required, making the use of such a system for billing purposes completely impractical.